


Below the Root

by Aesoleucian



Series: Incident Reports from the Usher Foundation [5]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Statement, The Buried - Freeform, Usher Foundation, well statements plural really. one per chapter.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-18
Updated: 2019-03-22
Packaged: 2019-10-30 17:42:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 13,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17833166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aesoleucian/pseuds/Aesoleucian
Summary: Gertrude wasn't the only person who noticed the Buried preparing for something big in America. In fact, most of the foundational work would have been done by the archivists actually working in the U.S. Slow realizations about the nature of Archivist work. Reports about claustrophobia. Gertrude "really very irritating" Robinson. And most importantly, bureaucratic procedure. This is the Usher Foundation, D.C.





	1. The Pit and the Pendulum

“When you open ReportLogger it will automatically pop up a window with a list of branch locations that haven’t contributed a report for over a month. Today it’s empty, which is great, but if there’s something on there you’ll have to call them to make sure they’re all right.”

Sal turns to frown at him. “Why wouldn’t they be all right?”

“Hm,” he says, scratching at his forehead. “Sometimes, eh, lines of communication go down. Or sometimes there are accidents we don’t hear about. Since we’re the root location we allocate funding, and we have to know if they need help and can’t ask.”

She lets him keep talking about how to log an incident report, but it still doesn’t add up. Frankly, a lot of things don’t add up about her new job. Or at least they don’t add up to what she expected, and there are some unknown variables in there. For instance: four of the five other archivists seem to be recovering from various kinds of injuries. For instance: the way Yossi and Dallas communicate over her head without speaking, in eye movements and small jerks of their heads. Tall people are the worst.

“So you should be ready to log your first report. Want to take it for a spin?”

“Sure,” she says, and opens up the secure email. It actually is a pretty cool system given how complicated it is to collect statements from 43 branch locations that apparently sometimes drop out of contact for no reason. And there’s a good chance she’ll get to help maintain it.

Yossi watches while she logs the report, which is easy, and prints the file since procedure is that everything should have a hard copy just in case. “Perfect,” he says. “You’re a natural. Now you can put it in the spreadsheet and mark that you’re reading it. Just make notes about any more research you think we’d need to do to corroborate it, and Julia will eventually look at it when you’ve marked it complete. I’ve got to run, I have an interview to do, but I can check your work when I’m done, or you can ask any of the other archivists. See you!”

So she reads.

 

Branch location: Usher Foundation Sioux Falls, 132 N Dakota Avenue

Instance reported by: Yelena Venarchick, via email  
Location of incident: Rapid City, SD  
Date received: 04-03-2006

Incident summary: An elevator that only goes down.

Description of incident:

I have a bad habit of running late for important things, so I made sure to take the early bus to my interview—that was at the Pennington County Building. It didn’t work out because the bus was delayed, so I was still running late by the time I got to the county building. That must be why I didn’t notice the “out of order” sign on the elevator. They should have put it on the door. But, if it was out of order, I don’t understand why the doors opened and the elevator moved. Whatever was wrong with that elevator, it wasn’t because it was broken.

I got in and pressed the button for the third floor, and the doors closed. I remember I noticed that the elevator smelled weird, like mildew or mold or a cave. I made a mental note to find out who could tell the cleaners, but I didn’t really think anything was wrong, even after the elevator jerked and started to move down. I was annoyed, and I pressed the 3 button again, but it didn’t start going up. I guess I figured that someone downstairs wanted to get on and go up, so I waited. It wasn’t until about a minute in, when it still hadn’t stopped at all, that I checked and realized that there weren’t any floors below the ground floor. I started looking for any of the buttons that would stop it so I could get off and take a different one, but there weren’t any floors I could tell it to stop at. I tried pushing the door open button, which I didn’t really think would work, but the doors _did_ open. They opened to the side of the elevator shaft, which was going by so quickly that I think the elevator was just falling. And the wall wasn’t smooth, because little bits of dirt and rocks kept going _ding_ on the side and falling in. I really panicked, then. I hadn’t wanted to press the emergency stop button before because I was pretty sure the elevator wouldn’t be able to move at all and I’d have to wait for someone to come find me. But now I pressed it, and the elevator jerked to a stop with a horrible screeching noise, so suddenly that I fell to my knees. I sat on the floor for a while. I was so full of adrenaline that I was breathing hard, because I thought I was going to die until it stopped.

Then I got up to my feet and went back over to the control panel. I was shaking. There was a button marked with a telephone symbol, so I pressed it. I wasn’t really sure how it worked, so I held it down for what felt like a whole minute before the speaker started to crackle. The interference was so bad that it took me a long time to realize that someone was actually talking. I had to ask them to repeat what they were saying a couple times, until I was panicking but I finally understood that they were saying, “What is your emergency?”

I tried to explain very slowly and clearly that I was in the elevator on the far left in the county building and I thought I’d been falling for two minutes and I needed to be rescued. The crackling voice told me to wait, so I did. The speaker went silent and I was left alone. The elevator smelled even more like dirt than it did when I got in, and the air that was beginning to leak in through the tiny crack between the shaft and the outside of the elevator, it was hot and smelled metallic. I waited for maybe ten minutes, and the elevator was getting hotter and hotter all the time, so eventually I decided I wasn’t _so_ likely to suffocate and pressed the door close button. The doors closed with a tortured grinding sound that made it seem like the tracks were full of gravel. I tried to call back whoever I was talking to before, but I couldn’t make out a single word in all the crackling interference, not even anything that sounded like it could be a human voice. I thought to myself that I must be deep, deep underground. I didn’t like that thought, so I started pacing. I stopped soon enough, because it made the elevator swing just enough to hit the walls of the shaft, and I had this awful irrational fear that I would somehow break the cable, and the elevator would fall forever and ever, down into the center of the earth. And it would get hotter and hotter until I was cooked alive inside that metal box, without enough air left to scream.

I pushed the door open button again just for something to do, but they wouldn’t open. I tried to imagine the technicians coming and prying them open with crowbars. All I could picture was standing there listening to their muffled voices and the sound of hammering until they gave up and left me still trapped inside. After that I used the call button again and again, about every five minutes. Sometimes I could make out the person on the other end telling me to stay calm and wait for help to arrive. Or maybe I imagined it, maybe I built a voice out of the crackling static that would say what I wanted to hear. Most of the time I couldn’t even manage that, and I just listened to the noise like it was a radio in the air raid bunker that would tell me when it was safe to come out. I even tried calling 911 on my phone, but I didn’t get any signal down there at all. Hours passed. Sometimes I almost felt calm for long stretches of time, until I would suddenly realize again that the elevator was growing hotter and I had no way out and I knew I imagined the voice telling me that help was coming. And then I would scream until my throat was worn out and my eyes were sore.

I’ll skip past the rest. I’ll skip past the ten hours I spent inside that elevator, watching my phone’s battery tick down and praying to any god that would hear me. I remember it was almost eight at night by my phone’s clock when I heard the scraping on the top of the elevator. My first thought was that _something_ had come. I stood in the furthest corner from it and held my handbag tightly, like I could really fight whatever was able to pry the top off the elevator. I listened in terrified silence to the scraping and banging noises and then suddenly a panel fell in onto the floor with a deafening _clang_.

“Sorry about that,” said a voice from outside. “You okay in there?”

I told him yes, I was okay, and then I was so relieved I started crying.

I don’t remember how I got back up into the lobby. I think they made some kind of temporary harness for me. I do remember clutching my phone so hard it dug into my hand, and checking the time compulsively just like I had been for ten hours. I caught the exact moment it came back into range of the cell towers and changed from 8:17 PM to 10:54 AM. So no, I don’t have any evidence that I spent ten hours there. I could have been hallucinating all of it. But I don’t think I was. I wish I’d asked them how they found me… did they feel the awful heat from the core of the Earth washing over them as they worked to free me? Did they feel the pressure of billions of tons of earth pressing in on them in that elevator shaft and fear they would never be free?

I didn’t ask. All I know is that I’m never getting into another elevator as long as I live.

 

Follow-up:

I was able to interview a worker at the Rapid City elevator monitoring group and one of the fire department employees who rescued Mrs. Venarchick (transcripts attached). According to their testimony I have reconstructed the timeline from their point of view. The monitoring group received an alert from the county building at 10:04 AM on March 27 and immediately called the fire department, whose people arrived on the scene at 10:27. If Mrs. Venarchick is correct that she returned to the lobby at 10:54, this would leave just under half an hour for them to locate and free her. The monitoring group worker further said that the audio quality of the call was, as Mrs. Venarchick described it, exceptionally poor, and he was not able to understand anything she said.

Recommendation: none. This is equally likely to be a fear-induced delusion and a genuine unexplainable occurrence, and as Mrs. Venarchick points out she has no evidence to corroborate her version of events.

B.K. 04-16-2006

 

Sal looks up from the monitor in a daze and is surprised to find herself looking at a white plaster wall rather than the acoustic panelling of an elevator. It certainly felt real, reading it. It felt so real that she was sure for just a moment that she would come back to herself and be trapped miles and miles underground. She spins her chair to face away from the computer and pushes her glasses up, rubbing her eyes. Maybe she can just… come back in a little bit. She needs some water.

She stands on unsteady legs and goes to the bathroom, where she spends way too long sitting silently in the stall before she realizes she really should get back to work. When she returns to the computer Yossi is standing next to it, peering around the corner. “I’m here,” she says, raising a hand. “Sorry, I don’t know how long you’ve been waiting, I just… incident reports are a lot.”

He grimaces. “You got a real one on your first day? Talk about bad luck.”

“What?”

“The, uh, I guess the ones that really are supernatural, they’re different. You can tell when you read them. They take it out of you.”

“Yeah… yeah, they do. Sorry, what am I supposed to do with it now?”

“Write up a short suggestion for what kind of research we’d need to do to confirm or deny it. And this isn’t official procedure, but Julia appreciates it if you can head it up with what the person was afraid of.” Seeing the confused look on her face he leans over the chair to skim the incident report that’s still on the screen. “This one’s claustrophobia. There are a few other categories that we see a lot of in the real reports. Fear of the dark, disaster, contamination, that kind of thing.” Her eyes drift down to the screen, where Yelena Venarchick’s terror still seems to bleed out into the air. She startles when a hand lands on her shoulder. “Hey, don’t worry. You’ll get used to it. We won’t put you on witness duty until you’re ready for it, okay?”

Sal can’t imagine having to hear someone talk about something like this in person. She sits down again and, with shaking fingers, writes up her summary to send to the head archivist.


	2. The Sleeper

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm in this one ::)

“If you don’t tell her, I’m going to.”

“What, is that a threat? Because I don’t even want to.”

“She’s your protégé, I thought she’d take it better coming from you.”

“G-d, I don’t know.” Yossi runs both hands through his hair, tipping his head back until all Dallas can see is his chin. “She’s smart. She’s smarter than either of us. I don’t know why she hasn’t figured it out already.”

“It took Hugh _dying_ before _we_ figured it out, cut her some slack.”

Yossi starts picking absently at the scar wrapped around his forearm, and Dallas whacks his hand to make him stop. He grimaces down at it. “No, no, I’ll tell her. It would just be nice if you were there. Maybe we can take her out to lunch or something.”

“I thought you’d tell me before we adopted a kid,” says Dallas, and signs into his computer as Yossi snorts. “Get going, I have work to do.”

“Oh, yes, sir. Your wish is my command, sir.”

“Lunch!” Dallas reminds him. “Today!”

 

They take Sal to the Potbelly down the street. She seems to sense the weird mood, because when they sit down with their food she says, “Okay, what? You look like you’re going to invite me to a funeral.”

Dallas elbows Yossi, who gives him an _I know, okay?_ look. He turns back to Sal and says, “You probably have some questions about the Archives.”

She gives him a measuring look.

“Is there anything that doesn’t… fit? Anything you think needs explaining? I promise, we won’t judge you. We’ve been there.”

“What happened just before I was hired?”

“Ah,” says Yossi, glancing at Dallas. “There was… an… attack.” She stares intently, and Yossi has to look away.

Dallas kicks him in the shin under the table and takes pity. “Yeah, the building got attacked by the Fear of the Dark. Or really, its people. And things. You’ve seen a couple reports with those people who seem like they have supernatural powers, right?”

“Yeah…”

“Well, some of them don’t like us very much.”

“And the branch locations?” she asks, frowning.

“Exactly. Sometimes someone gets it into their head to take out our supply lines.”

“Don’t make it sound like a war,” Yossi cuts in. “It’s not a war.”

“Most of the time,” Dallas adds.

All in all, Sal takes it well. She’s very quiet on the way back from lunch, but she’s quiet most of the time. She doesn’t seem like she’s going to quit immediately, but she does disappear into Julia’s office, probably to ask if it’s true. Dallas prints out the statement that came in this morning from Denver, slings his feet over the arm of the breakroom couch, and starts to read.

 

Branch location: Usher Foundation Denver, 931 14th Street, Floor 7

Instance reported by: Arthur Sario, via telephone  
Location of incident: Morrison, CO  
Date received: 07-11-2006  
Witness: Benjamin Shobhil 01810

Incident summary: Something is underneath the house.

Transcript:

AS: [sound of sniffling] Sorry, Sorry. I’ve got it together. Are you recording again?

BS: Yes. Go ahead.

AS: Right. So. My house is new. Not this-year new, but it was built in 2001. We don’t really have any neighbors, and normally I find that pretty restful—I like my peace and quiet. So does my wife, Daphne, but I’m especially sensitive to noises. That’s why as soon as we could we moved out of Highlands Ranch and into the mountains. But knowing you’re all the way out in the wilderness can make you a little nervous, you know? When you do hear noises at night they feel more significant. You can’t help but imagine everything you hear outside is a mountain lion. I guess I found out that hearing noises _inside_ the house is much worse.

It started happening at the beginning of spring. I’ve always liked spring, that feeling that the world is waking up. The birds come back and the garden starts to sprout leaves… Only this spring something else woke up with them. At the beginning the house just started to creak more than normal. I didn’t remember it happening last year, but it’s not something you’d necessarily remember for an entire year, and I told myself it was just the foundations warming up or something. So I ignored the creaking. Then the knocking started.

The first time was while Daphne was at work. I work from home about half the time because some days I don’t have the energy to get in a car and drive down the mountain, so I was alone in the kitchen making lunch. I was just about to get up and get my food out of the microwave when I heard it, muffled but definitely right under me. Knock. Knock. Knock. And then a pause. Knock. Knock. Knock. I thought that with every knock I could feel the floor shuddering faintly under my feet, as if something was pushing itself upward with great force from underneath the house. I froze, listening, but it didn’t happen again that day.

The strange thing is, it never happened when Daphne was at home. But almost every day when I had to work from home I would hear it at some point. It was always coming from under the kitchen, which actually made it  more frightening because I couldn’t get the image out of my head that there was something under it, under the ground. The knocking has been getting stronger over a period of about three months, so the dishes started to rattle in the cupboards. When that happened I would be paralyzed in my chair, just waiting for it to be over. The walls would seem to bow inward like they were going to collapse on me, and I swear I could hear them cracking. I would curl up into the smallest ball I could and close my eyes, but somehow it wasn’t a comfort. In the tiny warm cave between my knees my breath was as loud and hot as a steam engine, and I felt trapped inside. It took me longer and longer to uncurl after the knocking stopped. I felt like my body was turning to stone and it was an enormous effort to break it.

I told Daphne about it, of course, but she didn’t have any more idea than I did. And she couldn’t stay home with me—she’s a sales representative at Sears so she needs to be on-site. I couldn’t even listen to music with headphones on to not hear it. I would get so paranoid that every beat was the knocking come back again that I had to take them off and check. And even though I was terrified, it was easier to be sure. I spent a lot of time sitting on the porch, and even then I could sometimes feel the house shudder. There was nowhere I could go to escape it without just walking into the woods, which took more energy than going to work would. So I started going to work every day.

It worked for a while. I thought I was getting used to it, and maybe there was no reason I’d been working from home part-time for five years. But I had to ignore more and more pain, and I told myself it was normal, and when you push yourself to the edge every day for two weeks… I’m bedridden right now. I’m exhausted just being on the phone with you, but I’m more scared not to. I can’t move and I’m so, so afraid it will happen again, and I won’t be able to get away. Is that silly? It’s just knocking. It feels like so much more than that. But that’s why I called you, I guess, to get some kind of reassurance that it can’t possibly be something… paranormal. It’s just the house settling, or the wi—

[AS stops as the recorder picks up a booming sound on the other end of the line, along with faint rattling. Three blows.]

AS: There it is! Can you tell me what that is? Please.

BS: I’m afraid I can’t without a little more research into the history of the house. But if there is something buried un—

[Once again three tremendous blows.]

AS: The floor… the floor is tilting. It’s going to give way… [A thump from the other end of the line, and AS’s labored breathing.] I have to get out, I have to get out… I’m going to try and get to the front door. I don’t care if I’m bedridden for a month, I don’t care if I have to sit outside until… ahh… until Daphne gets home. I can’t… be… in this house.

[Under the sound of AS’s labored breathing there are splintering, cracking noises, and a series of thumps. AS groans in pain.]

AS: Almost there. Almost there.

[A tremendous crash, and AS cries out in surprise.]

AS: The wall just—it just fell over!

BS: I’m going to get Baz to call the fire department right now, try to get out of the house if you can. [BS is faintly audible speaking away from the microphone.] Arthur, what’s your address? Arthur?

AS: Oh my G-d… Something is coming through the floor! Can you hear it?

BS: Yes, I can, but I need your address to get you help.

AS: 541 Spring Ridge Road… What… what is that? Is it a _person_?

[A third voice makes a groaning noise that can be faintly heard on the other end of the line.]

UNKNOWN: Who built a house on me? What the fuck?

AS: Who are you?

UNKNOWN: Me? I’m nobody. Absolutely nobody. That’s why they call me Odysseus. [Laughs.]

BS: Help is on the way. Can you describe the person?

AS: Uh—tall and broad, covered in… in dirt, leather jacket, um…

UNKNOWN: Oh, for fuck’s sake, are you calling the police? They won’t get here in time.

AS: What do you want?

UNKNOWN: A decent nap wouldn’t be too much to ask, would it? You go out of your way to find a nice isolated plot of dirt nobody in their right mind would ever dig up and bam, someone builds a fucking house on you. This house is your fault, isn’t it?

[A crash on the other end of the line. AS screams.]

UNKNOWN: I’m feeling a little cranky. After all the time I had to spend getting out of your foundation, I might be late for the party. So I’m going to bring this place down around your ears.

[More crashing, and AS’s screams. After two minutes thirty-eight seconds the noises stop except for quiet sobbing, and footsteps on a shifting surface, growing louder. When the unknown voice speaks again it is much closer to the telephone.]

UNKNOWN: Eugh, this smells like eyes. Hi, Archivist. You just had to call for help, didn’t you? I could have gotten so much more out of this one. He could have been trapped for hours and hours before anyone found him. Oh, well. I’ll find someone else. I’ll be off, don’t mind me. As far as you’re concerned, Nobody was here.

[Transcript ends.]

 

Follow-up:

By the time paramedics arrived, forty minutes after the call ended, Arthur Sario was already dead, crushed under a collapsed wall near the front of the house. His wife said that he worked for a cybersecurity company based in Highlands Ranch and often worked from home when his fibromyalgia made it impossible to go to work. She also confirmed that he had first mentioned hearing the knocking three months ago, around mid-April. I sent Cory to take a look at the site, but he wasn’t able to find much in the thoroughly collapsed house. He did find that most of the floors were relatively intact aside from the floor in the kitchen, which not only seemed to have ruptured upward but also revealed a tunnel through the concrete foundation underneath. From Cory’s photographs I cannot determine how the tunnel was made. The sides are rough and unfinished, and in places appear to be almost scooped out. Cory insists that although it doesn’t show up in the photographs the concrete has been gouged out by human teeth.

The seismographs at UC Denver and the School of Mines both registered a minor earthquake, at 1:32 PM on the same day. The magnitude was about a 3.4, and with additional data the location has been triangulated to the mountains just west of Morrison proper, the approximate location of Arthur and Daphne Sario’s house. I suspect that more collapsed buildings will appear wherever “Odysseus” goes, but since I can’t guess their direction I haven’t been able to find anything.

Recommendation: Keep, high priority. I don’t know what the hell chewed its way out from under that house, but it’s clearly very dangerous. I would also recommend trying to track it with seismic data. I will be doing so, and if you want what I’ve collected, email me at jcohen@usherfounddenver.org.

J.C. July 20, 2006

 

Dallas is already standing by the time he finishes reading it, and doesn’t bother to knock on Julia’s door before he pushes it open. “We just got a report—oh.”

Julia gestures for him to continue as Sal straightens from where she was leaning over the desk. It seems like he’s interrupted an argument. “It’s a little bit… you want Sal to be here for this?”

Sal’s mouth tightens, and he feels like kind of a bad mentor, but Julia waves her hand. “It will be illustrative. Go on.”

“All right. I’ve been reading this report. An agent of Claustrophobia surfaced near Denver—I mean that literally, by the way, they were hibernating under someone’s house—and they said they didn’t want to ‘miss the party,’ which is, uh, never gonna be good news for us. The Denver archivist recommends we track them by seismic events and collapsed buildings. Have you ever heard about one called Nobody, or Odysseus?”

“A classics fan, are we,” murmurs Julia. “Despite what you might think, I don’t have perfect recall, but I think so. Check around the eighties or nineties.” She looks down for a moment to skim the report, and then says, “You’ll head up the project to track Odysseus. Drop whatever else you need to. If their ‘party’ is soon, a couple delayed reports won’t matter as much as stopping it. If you need more help ask anyone you want, but Sal is also assigned to this project with priority.” She raises her eyebrows at Sal, who stares for a moment and then gives a little nod/shrug. “Wonderful. Tell me as soon as you find anything.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Sal falls into step with him as they leave the office. “Would you check for collapsed buildings in the Denver area?” he asks. “I have to email the Denver archivist and start cross-referencing other reports on Claustrophobia.”

She nods again.

“Good news is, cross-referencing will be easy. As long as Julia’s been here we’ve been tagging all the reports with their fears and now we have a searchable database. Just be glad you weren’t here when she took over from the old guy, we did nothing but tag old reports for months and months.” As always, she seems to be impervious to any attempt to lighten the mood. She and Julia will probably get along scary well when she stops being mad about blah blah evil secrets.

“Is there anything else you’re not telling me?” she asks. “Like you weren’t telling me about the fear god stuff?”

Dallas wants to make a joke about how he has to have _some_ privacy, but she won’t appreciate it. “Cross my heart,” he tells her. “You know everything I know.”

“What about Julia?”

“Of course she knows more than us,” says Dallas. Sal’s paranoia must be affecting him, because for a moment that makes him feel uneasy. “That’s her job.”


	3. The Fall of the House of Usher

“Bad news,” says Cameron at the office door.

Julia sighs and gestures her to come in. “That’s about what I expect, yes.”

“Sorry, boss. This one’s kind of a double whammy. Report from Salt Lake about, uh, why the Boise branch is down. It was Odysseus and a, uh, new friend.”

Julia takes the report and purses her lips unhappily.

“You need anything else? Want me to start anything while you’re reading that?”

“No, I’ll talk to Frances about it. Thank you, Cameron.”

 

Branch location: Usher Foundation Salt Lake City, 57 W 200 S, Suite 201

Instance reported by: Celine Powell 01002, via phone  
Location of incident: Boise, ID  
Date received: 01-05-2007  
Witness: David Young 00950

Incident summary: Attack on the Boise branch office.

Transcript:

CP: Hello? Is this the Usher Foundation?

DY: Yes, this is David Young with the User Foundation Salt Lake. Would you like to schedule a research appointment, make a report, or something else?

CP: I need to make a report. I’m—I’m from the Foundation’s Boise branch. It’s been destroyed.

DY: Destroyed? Can I—first, can I get your name? Are you safe?

CP: I… yeah, I think so. I’m Celine Powell. That’s, um, spelled like Celine Dion. I’m in a, um, in the Twin Falls Public Library. I didn’t really know who else to call, and since I was planning on going to Salt Lake I thought—maybe I could come there?

DY: Yeah! Yeah, um, I’ll ask He—uh, the head archivist, but I’m sure he’ll say yes. What happened to everyone else from your branch?

CP: I don’t know. None of them are answering their phones. I don’t know if they’re alive, even. There were these—well, they _looked_ like people, but I don’t think they can possibly be people.

DY: Okay, Celine, slow down. Can you start from the beginning? Tell me exactly what happened, in as much detail as you can. Just like anyone making a report.

CP: Yeah. Yeah. So, it was yesterday. Yesterday evening, after when I usually go home. Sorry, it was just after six, but we were having a really productive day so a lot of people stayed late. And the building started shaking. We don’t get a ton of earthquakes in Boise, but my brother used to be really into natural disasters so I knew that you’re supposed to get under your desk or in a doorway. That… turned out to be the wrong thing to do. The space under the desk started to seem really small. So small it was crushing me, so small I couldn’t get out if I wanted to. I couldn’t seem to take a full breath because it was crushing my ribcage—and then there was a scream from another room, and I could move again.

I couldn’t stand to stay in there any longer so I was out like a shot. The whole room was doing the same thing, though. The room seemed so small that I had to get out of there. I didn’t even think about anyone else. I only thought about saving myself.

DY: And if you hadn’t, we wouldn’t know about this. Don’t beat yourself up about it.

CP: [Sniffs] Thanks. Um, so I tried to run out of the room, but the doorways were all sort of… folding in on themselves. I can’t really describe it. It looked like space wasn’t normal there, I guess, like… you know how in documentaries about black holes they talk about how you get squeezed thinner and thinner until you can fit through a hole the size of a pinhead? It was like a black hole. I looked into it and I knew it would be like that. But I realized that the, well, the walls had warped so much that all the windows were shattering. I knew it was dangerous, but it was my only chance. As I was about to start climbing out someone shouted my name—“Celine!” I turned and saw that James had his leg caught under a shelf that had fallen over. I felt so guilty, I should have checked for anyone else first, I was just panicking. So I went to help him out from under it and we went to the window together. He showed me how to use a coat over the windowsill to not get cut by the shards. I remember I was wondering if he could still wear it, if it wouldn’t be full of broken glass, since it was freezing outside and all. But I guess it didn’t end up mattering.

We were trying to get toward the parking lot when someone stepped out in front of us. It was a woman with red hair and a dark red coat. She was close enough that I could see she was wearing a spade necklace—like the suit of cards. The other one had the same necklace, actually. Um, and she said something about how she couldn’t let anyone get away. She said… she was annoyed, because she didn’t even want to come, like she had better things to do, but she might as well do the job right. It was something like that. I’m sorry I can’t remember more clearly, it’s all this huge terrifying blur.

DY: That’s completely understandable. What happened next?

CP: She walked toward us. It, you know, it didn’t occur to either of us that she _caused_ the earthquake, and I wasn’t thinking straight, so I guess I thought she was another person who’d escaped from one of the buildings. So we didn’t run away. James actually took a couple of steps toward her and started to ask her—something, maybe whether she was all right—and she… took his head in her hands… Sorry, I’ll…

She… crushed it. She crushed his head with her bare hands. It didn’t explode or anything like in movies, that’s the worst… part. It just… made this wet _crunch_ noise, and suddenly it was only a couple inches wide. Like a pancake! I saw his _brain_ dripping out the back. I’m just glad he was in front of me so I never had to see his face.

[CP begins to sob. Five minutes of audio have been cut from this recording for lack of relevance.]

CP: Sorry. Sorry. What was I saying?

DY: The red-haired woman… killed James.

CP: Oh, G-d. I stood there, totally unable to move, until she looked right in my eyes and took a step forward. Then it was like my muscles suddenly remembered how to move and I ran the other way as fast as I could. I could barely see through the tears in my eyes, so I guess it isn’t surprising that I ran into someone coming out of where the back door used to be. I tried to wipe my eyes and apologized and looked up. They were really, really tall, like probably seven feet. They had, um, a leather bomber jacket and these red-tinted glasses. Kind of lightish hair, I guess. But what really caught my attention was the spade necklace, the same as that woman. They put their hand on my shoulder and I almost sank to my knees, it was so heavy. I staggered, and as I looked down at the ground I could see that their footsteps had left a line of little… sort of depressions in the asphalt, with cracks running out from them. They said, sorry, but it would be a problem if the… Eye heard about this. No hard feelings.

I _knew_ I was about to die just then. I couldn’t stop imagining what it would feel like to have my skull crushed. But just at that moment there was a crash from the building and I heard Mariah’s voice—Mariah is the head archivist at Boise. Oh, G-d, she _was_ the head archivist. They must have killed her. She—she yelled a question at them, like what exactly they were doing there. I thought she was just trying to distract them, you know? But they actually turned around and answered. I didn’t hear all of it because I started running as soon as I registered they weren’t paying attention to me any more, but I did hear a little. They said they didn’t mean to be here, they were only here because someone… pulled some strings? And then there was another crash, and I’m sure it must have been something falling on Mariah, but I didn’t look back. I ran until my throat tasted like blood and my legs gave out, and I threw up right there on the sidewalk.

I don’t know how long I stayed there. It wasn’t that long, or someone probably would have tried to call an ambulance. The first time someone tried to ask me if I was okay, I got up and started walking. I couldn’t run any more. I’d left my car in the parking lot, and I knew I couldn’t go back there, so I headed for the bus depot. The Foundation’s office is actually in Northwest Boise, so it took over two hours to walk there, and it was completely dark by that time, and I hadn’t eaten anything and I was so paranoid that I was jumping at every person who walked by. I really didn’t want to go inside another building, but the Greyhound station is pretty big inside, and it was well-lit, so that made me feel a little better. I asked what was the next bus that was leaving. There’s basically only two kinds of buses out of Boise, the kind that leaves first thing in the morning and the kind that leaves last thing at night. So the next bus I could get was the one heading toward Salt Lake, where I’d have to wait about two hours for it to leave.

I, um, the reason I ended up in Twin Falls is that I got out to pee during a rest stop and ended up having a panic attack in the bus station bathroom. They’re so small, you know. They’re just so small. I lost… I don’t know, half an hour in there? And when I got back outside, the bus had left. It only goes through once a day, so I had to figure out somewhere to wait. I was starving by then, but it was 1:30, so I had to walk to the other end of town to find a 24-hour diner. I wonder what they must have thought of me there, but I guess I wasn’t the only person in there. As soon as the library opened I came here to charge my phone and use the internet. And I looked you guys up and called and… here we are.

DY: Wow.  Celine, you’re incredible. I don’t know if I could manage to be as together as you are right now. You get here as soon as possible, okay? If Henry won’t let you stay at the Foundation you can stay at my house however long you need to. Sorry, I mean, I guess that’s the end of the report?

CP: Yeah. That’s it.

[Transcript ends.]

 

Follow-up:

I haven’t done any yet, since I thought you’d want to know this as soon as possible. I am sending a couple people to check out the site of the attack, since I don’t believe those two will be sticking around, and I’ll let you know as soon as their investigation is done. Email hgarm@usherfoundslc.org with any questions.

H.G. 01/05/07

 

Julia emails the Salt Lake archivist back asking for a phone number where she can reach Powell, and then gets up.

Frances’ office door is open, so she goes in without knocking. “More bad news?” asks Frances.

“I’d like to ask you seriously whether you have ever gotten good news while working here.”

“Sometimes my employees do their job wonderfully, and I think that’s good news. But _that’s_ not. What is it this time?”

“The Boise office was taken down by Tamara Walters and Odysseus,” says Julia, and frowns. Who is Tamara Walters? “I suspect that the Fear of Manipulation had something to do with it, though. I wonder, actually, if the Claustrophobia agents weren’t forced to backtrack, because as far as I’m aware Odysseus has been heading southwest ever since they emerged.”

“Hmm.” Frances holds out her hand, and Julia takes it automatically as she closes her eyes. Julia lends her focus, since she’s seen the site, and a moment later Frances sighs. “Yes. I can’t See them, but in a stringy sort of way. What I’m worried about is the fact that we were allowed to find this out. I can’t think of a reason Manipulation would want us to know that it’s pitting us against Claustrophobia.”

“I suppose there’s no point considering that they _didn’t_ want us to know? Not all of them are political masterminds, you know. Some just have the ability to manipulate a few people at once.”

“See what you turn up, then,” says Frances with the air of someone who is choosing to end an argument while she still has the high ground. “I have to figure out relief funding for Boise. If there’s even anyone to accept it. You’re lucky you’re an Archivist, you know.”

“I’m sorry, did you take this job because you wanted to become a panopticon, or did you actually agree to do administrative work?” Julia smiles at Frances as she throws her hands up in mock exasperation.

“That’s me told, isn’t it! Go and curate something.”

“Yes, ma’am. Shall I tell Powell we’ll keep in touch about her pay? I was thinking of asking the Salt Lake office to just hire her while this gets sorted out.”

“She might want to go back to where her family and friends are.”

“Oh. Yes. I forgot about those.” Julia resists the urge to rub at the back of her neck; it’s an obvious tell and a bad habit—not that Frances needs tells to read her. “Well, I’ll ask her.”

Frances smiles warmly, and puts her hand over Julia’s again. “I consider it a compliment that the Foundation is the only family you need.”

It’s not. As she leaves, Julia thinks Frances knows that. She _must_ know that Julia found out what happened to her parents. But that was a long time ago, and even if Julia cannot forget or forgive, she can at least appreciate that it was for the best in the end.


	4. The Valley of Unrest

When he checks the info@usherfounddc inbox in the morning, there’s an email from the London archivist. To be honest, he wasn’t aware there _was_ a London archivist until today, although it does make more sense than there not being one. Obviously it’s not only in America that people need to report supernatural encounters. Does that imply that there are more Usher Foundations in other countries?

The email reads:

> To whom it may concern,  
>  Please inform your head archivist that I will be visiting this coming Monday the 10th, and if possible provide her personal contact information so that I can coordinate with her directly. Attached is a statement she may find interesting.
> 
> Regards,  
>  Gertrude Robinson, head archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

The statement is an incident report from 1952 about what can only be described as a piece of Claustrophobia inhabiting some poor man’s body. Somehow Robinson seems to know they’re looking into Claustrophobia right now. But how could she know that if she doesn’t even know Julia’s name?

Well, Julia can decide that. He knocks, because although he could just forward it to her he wants to ask some questions, and gets a muffled “Come in, Yossi.” She never has explained how she always knows it’s him.

“Someone from the… Magnus Institute? Wants to meet with you?”

Julia frowns. “From the Magnus Institute? That’s unusual.”

“Who are they? The Magnus people, I mean. It’s kind of weird that there would be an organization exactly like ours in the UK.”

“That’s who they are,” says Julia, shrugging. “I keep forgetting that… Well, I have heard a little about their head archivist. She’s not very professional, for all that she’s had the position longer than the Foundation has existed.” Yossi stares at her, and she laughs. “It’s a strange thought, isn’t it?”

He relents and smiles too. “Who do you even hear gossip like that from?”

“Frances, actually.”

“Huh. Maybe I’ll ask her about it.”

“On your break, though, if you please.”

“Yes ma’am, Ms. Zhou.”

 

When he comes back into the assistants’ office Sal has arrived and looks up sharply at him. She’ll say what she wants to say, when she wants to say it, so he doesn’t bother her about it, just smiles at her.

“Yossi,” she says, and then pauses. “I’ve been reading the uncategorized reports, the ones that are real but don’t fit in with any of the eleven fears we track. It’s sort of a side project along with the Claustrophobia stuff. I noticed that a huge fraction of them are all… well, I think there’s a category we missed.” He raises his eyebrows at her and she goes on. “Fear of being watched. Fear of being followed. Fear of surveillance. We have hundreds of them, but neither Julia nor the old head archivist have made it official.”

“You’re not proposing that Julia hasn’t noticed,” Yossi guesses.

“Yeah. I’m saying she has a reason for leaving a category out. I’ve been thinking for a while about what reason she could have for that, because it would make cross-referencing a lot easier. And then I read this report from Austin, 2000, which was never logged or even accepted. I found it seven years back in the reports inbox.”

She hands him a printout, and, though he’s starting to get nervous about where this is going, he starts to read.

 

Branch location: Usher Foundation Austin, 412 E 6th St

Instance reported by: 5Eqz09y2@hotmail.com, 98.22.31.90  
Location of incident: Sugarland, TX  
Date received: 02-13-2000

Incident summary: A threat.

Fuck you, Andre Cortez. Fuck you and your assistants and everyone who works at your Foundation. Fuck your janitors. I haven’t slept a full night in a YEAR thanks to you. Get out of my head and die. Is this any way to thank someone who came and made a report? I was trying to help you. No, I was trying to ask for help, and you did nothing for me. You told me the woman who ate my left hand was just a psychopath and I should call the police, because YOU DON’T LISTEN. You would have known a psychopath couldn’t eat my hand THREE TIMES. You would have known the police couldn’t help me. And you knew you could have told me why it was happening, and you DIDN’T.

So stay out of my dreams or I’ll burn your Foundation to the ground with you in it. Yes, you, Andre Cortez. See how it feels when someone stands there and watches and does NOTHING to help you. I hope you hate it. I hope the last moment of your life you look up at me through the flames and you see me holding a fucking fire extinguisher and I hope you die hurting ten times worse than you can ever imagine.

Fuck.

You.

 

Follow-up:

I’m sending this on without doing any research. Aside from noting that the report referred to here is clearly #1999-02, making the sender of the email Virgil Desmond, there isn’t much to look into. I’ve called the police, but as a precaution I’m in the process of moving all our hard copies of reports to offsite storage until he’s arrested. It’s worth noting that the substance of this report is true. I have been dreaming of Mr. Desmond since he made his report last January, as his is one of the few I witnessed myself.

Recommendation: Discard. Sending this is really just to make sure you’re informed in case Mr. Desmond does succeed in destroying the Austin branch, although I don’t think he will.

A.C. Feb. 14, 2000

 

“Shit,” says Yossi. “Did he? Burn down the Austin branch?”

“Oh, yeah, about a week later. Cortez died along with his assistant and two administrative staff. I don’t know about the rest of them, but it sounds like he deserved it.”

“Sal!”

“You think he didn’t? Apparently he was—I don’t know, eating people’s nightmares. It sounds like every time he witnessed a report in person he started dreaming about it. And the person who made the report would dream about it too.”

“Well, I’m not going to argue about whether a man who’s been dead for seven years deserved it. I don’t see how it’s applicable to us. I’ve witnessed dozens of reports and I don’t dream about them.”

Sal sits up straight, frowning in confusion. “You—you don’t?”

“Sal, are you telling me you _do_?”

“I thought it was just… they’re horrible. I keep thinking about them, so it makes sense I would have nightmares. But if this is true, Yossi, then I did this same thing to three people. I need to find out if anyone else here is having these dreams. Did Julia ever witness any reports in person?”

“I don’t know… it would have been before I got hired—where are you going?”

“I’m going to ask Julia. She has this… it’s just a vibe. She has this _vibe_ that she knows about this. I can’t explain more than that.”

Yossi stands up to hurry after Sal into Julia’s office, feeling like all of this is a bad idea. For such a quiet person Sal can be really impulsive when she’s worked up. By the time he gets there she’s already asking loudly, “Do you dream about the reports you’ve witnessed?”

He stands halfway behind the doorframe, peering out at Julia. She’s looking calmly up at Sal, and it seems like she might not answer at all. Then she asks, “Do you think that’s important?”

“I think they dream of us too,” says Sal in a low voice. “I think they are terrified every night because of us, and I think you know that already.”

“How did you find out?”

“I found a report from 2000 that was never logged. Virgil Desmond had been dreaming about the woman who—”

Julia waves her hand, and Sal’s mouth snaps shut. “Please don’t stand at the door, Yossi. I’d rather you come in and close it.

He comes in and closes it.

“What did you do to me?” Sal hisses, leaning even further over the desk.

“As an Archivist, it isn’t difficult to get people to tell me things. It’s a very useful skill when your job is collecting information.” Yossi can actually hear the capital letter in the title: Archivist, not archivist. “Please sit down, Sal. I will explain everything, since I suspect you won’t rest until you know it anyway. You’re an Archivist too, now.” Sal does not sit down, and neither does Yossi, out of solidarity, so Julia sighs and continues. “I think you already have an idea that there is a twelfth type of fear we don’t tag for, because it’s us. The Fear of the Watcher. You’re thinking that we’re just as bad as the supernatural entities we keep an eye on. But we aren’t like them. I may be an agent of the Watcher, but my goal isn’t to create as much fear as possible. It’s to collect information, so that when something big happens we can be ready for it. The nightmares… are a side effect.”

“And there’s no way to do this without hurting people? Bullshit.”

“We do need a minimum of power to protect ourselves from the other Fears and their agents. Let me tell you exactly what we’re here to prevent, since I don’t think you understand the stakes. Claustrophobia is preparing for a ritual. How did it put that… preparing to ‘make the sky to fall and become an eternity of mud.’ It will change the world, and its new world will be so much worse for everyone on Earth than a few people out of every million having nightmares. You might not like what we have to do, but it is _necessary_.”

“How do you know they actually _can_ —make the sky fall?” Yossi asks.

“Because it’s almost happened over and over. Lisbon, 1755. The great earthquake, the flood, the firestorm. Hundreds of thousands of people dead. And the Fear of Disaster didn’t succeed. That is what stopping them looks like when we don’t act quickly enough.” Although Julia waits a long time for her to speak, Sal is silent. “On the other hand, consider Arizona, 1731. The failed ritual of Agoraphobia was so thoroughly buried that no-one ever learned about it. _We_ did that, Sal. It was the agents of the Watcher who made war on Agoraphobia. We are in a unique position among all the Fear in this world, because we know what no-one else knows. We know what they are doing, and when, and where, and we know how to stop them. Do you think that’s worth doing?”

Sal stands for a long moment with her head bowed; behind the desk where Julia cannot see them, her fists are clenched and pressed into her sides. Finally she says, “Yeah. It’s worth doing. I’ll help.”


	5. The Premature Burial

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> this is the chapter where I concentrated all the gay shit. and by gay shit I mean HIGHLY questionable emotional/magical manipulation. ahh watcher/archivist ships. necessarily awful.

Branch location: Usher Foundation Toronto, 832 Eglinton Avenue East

Instance reported by: Samuel Rood  
Location of incident: Gowganda, ON  
Date received: 08-24-2007  
Witness: Erin Guillon 00512

Incident summary: A book about tunnels.

Materials included:  
1 bound paper copy: “No Stone Unturned: a guide to urban exploration”  
6 photographs: 4 previous iterations of the Gowganda map and 2 of the trapdoor and cellar

Transcript:

EG: —at’s a fair point. I just want to make sure you know what you’re doing when you sign.

SR: I can’t believe the first time I ever got carded it’s by the Ghostbusters.

EG: We’re recording.

SR: Oh! Okay, um. So I have this book, like I said, and it’s dangerous. Really dangerous. I’m pretty sure my cousin Cici got it for me as a joke when she found out I was going to have to live in Gowganda, to take care of my grandpa. Because it’s about urban exploration, get it? And Gowganda is the furthest thing you can possibly get from urban. Not that Englehart is exactly the big city either, but it seemed like it would be totally useless in a… well, it’s not even a town. Everyone doesn’t live together, so it’s more of a, just a forest with some people in it, I guess. Grandpa wanted me to be able to drive him around so he could visit his friends since he’s mostly blind now, and so I could help him clean the house and get groceries and stuff. But when I’m not helping him it’s really boring, and I can only sit and play chess with him or listen to him tell stories for so long before I go crazy. So I’ve been reading and gardening a lot, because I have to stay close to the house.

At first I didn’t look at the exploration book just because I was mad at Cici, but about a month into the summer I’d already read every other book my grandpa had and I was getting desperate. So I read the exploration book. It’s in two parts. The first part is the guide part, where it tells you how to pick locks and what kind of doors usually go where, and all kinds of stuff you’d never really see in Englehart, let alone Gowganda. Access tunnels. I didn’t even know what an access tunnel was, and I still don’t know why you’d want to go in one. In a big city like Toronto I can’t believe anyone would be bored enough to go underground, but I guess some people do it anyway. Um, the second part is a bunch of maps of different cities. The first ones are big ones, Toronto and Mississauga are in there, and Albany. There are some I’ve never heard of, they might be in the US. And right at the end is Gowganda. It’s kind of stupid to make a map of Gowganda in the first place, since there’s one house about every twenty miles except at the camp. The map doesn’t have anything about geography. Just the way the houses are connected by these underground tunnels.

At the beginning there weren’t tunnels. There was just one, that started in my grandpa’s basement and ended up in Carla’s basement a couple miles away. The thing is, my grandpa never had a basement. I know because I swept the whole house every week for a month and there was no trapdoor until I opened that book. And then there was.

I went in, of course, because how are you doing to not check out a trapdoor that suddenly appears in your house? There were stairs down and then this tiny little room, like so small there was no point making it. The walls were hard packed dirt like a root cellar, but there were no vegetables or anything, just one dark doorway, and the ceiling was so low my head almost touched the top. It wasn’t like the pictures of the tunnels with smooth concrete walls and tangles of bright red pipes and valves. It was exactly the kind of tunnel you’d expect a hundred miles from anywhere.

I closed the trapdoor and went to ask my grandpa about it. He said he didn’t have a basement, so I went and opened it and he looked down and said something weird was afoot. I always love it when he says something is _afoot_. The way he said it, it wasn’t like he was worried, so it made me think it was like an adventure. I offered to go down there with a flashlight and see where it went. Grandpa insisted on coming with me even though he doesn’t walk that good, so I helped him down the stairs and we went into the tunnel. And it really was just a tunnel. They’re all _just_ tunnels. Sort of. But there’s something really creepy about them. Away from the room under the trapdoor the tunnel wasn’t as square. It got round and kind of… flowy? It felt like walking down something’s throat. And it didn’t help that it was getting really warm. In the summer you always expect underground to be colder, but it was getting warm. After about half an hour Grandpa was getting really tired, so we went back. When we got out of the trapdoor he sat down in his chair like he was completely exhausted and told me to get him some water and push a rug over it. So I did.

I already had an idea that the book had something to do with it, so while he was asleep I opened it again and looked at the map. And it was _different_ than the first time. Someone had added in two more tunnels. I think one was between two of the houses in the camp and the other one went under the lake somehow. The thing is… I really wanted to know if the map was right. I really, really wanted to know. I felt like it would tell me something important about the map. So while Grandpa was sleeping I moved the rug and went back into the tunnel.

It was really long and twisty, so that I could never exactly tell which direction I was going, and I don’t know how long I was down there for before I got to the end. It was a room just like the one under the trapdoor at our house, and when I shined my flashlight up at the ceiling I could see a trapdoor there too, at the top of the stairs. I pushed up on it just enough to peek out, and there was Carla singing in her kitchen while she fried fish. I closed it and went back. I didn’t really want her to know I kind of broke into her house. I didn’t tell Grandpa either, because I knew he’d be mad I went down without asking him. The funny thing is, when I came back out the sun had barely moved, even though it seemed like I’d been in there so long the sun should have set.

I wasn’t going to go back down there, honest. Except when my grandpa visits his friends they seriously go on and on and on, and following the tunnels doesn’t take any time. I started bringing the book and a flashlight everywhere we went so I’d always have something to do. And every time I opened it more tunnels would appear, running together and crossing and branching off. I took a bunch of pictures of what the map used to look like and printed them out for you. Um, if you are going to explore them, though, I should tell you the map doesn’t actually help once you’re down there. It’s good for finding entrances, but once you’re underground it isn’t anything like the map. I didn’t see crossroads that I thought I should see, and I did see ones that weren’t on the map. I tried to draw my own on the back but every time I went down the same tunnel they’d be different so I kind of gave up.

It really wasn’t very fun. I was just desperate. I don’t know… I don’t know why I was so desperate. It just seemed really convenient, I guess. But I’m done with it now. Last week when we were over at Carla’s house I went down and got really, really lost. The tunnels were more complicated than ever, and even when I wrote down my turns and tried to follow them back it didn’t work. The map kept changing, so why did I think the tunnels wouldn’t? Stupid. I started to panic like I never had before, and it was like the tunnels could tell I was afraid. They started to get tighter and tighter until I could only move sideways. And tighter until I couldn’t get forward at all. I swear I could feel the walls pushing in on me slowly, slowly, every second. I started to cry, mostly because I was thinking about how Grandpa would never know what happened to me and, I know this is stupid, I was crying because Carla would have to drive him home and she might be annoyed at him. I stood there and cried until I was done crying, and I realized I could breathe. I sort of slid out backward and started running, thinking I would just go until I found the first way out, no matter where it was. I ran until my legs started to seize up and my throat tasted like blood, and I always took the left branch when there was a fork. I don’t know how long it was before I made it out. It felt like _days_ , and I thought I was going to die of thirst, the way my tongue dried out and stuck to my teeth. But I did get out. And somehow I actually made it back into Carla’s house. Now I actually think that was a trap, to make me think the tunnels would be helpful sometimes. They were trying to pretend to be my friend.

Anyway, I burst out covered in sweat and dirt and started crying in relief and went to hug my grandpa. I guess I interrupted his conversation but I told him that I’d been going into the tunnels without permission and said I was really sorry and everything and told him everything that happened. I guess he and Carla put their heads together and figured that everyone in Gowganda could be in danger if they went into the tunnels in their houses, so they got me to drive them around to every house and explain about the tunnels.

But that was when Grandpa started having dreams about me going into the tunnels again, even though I promised him I wouldn’t. He thought I wouldn’t be able to help myself, and I would find him standing by the trapdoor staring down at it. He almost seemed like he was half asleep, and he wouldn’t leave until I turned the lights on and showed him I was really there. So… that’s where I think he went. I think he’s still down there. I think he walked down last night like he was sleepwalking because he thought I was in danger and he’s still—he’s still wandering in there, or he’s dead by now, he died of thirst and I couldn’t do anything ‘cause I know how time works in the tunnels, and, and, I couldn’t send people to look for him! ‘Cause they would just get lost too! There’s nothing I can do to help him, I just—

I guess I just have to make sure no-one ever reads this book again. Please don’t let anyone look at it. Please be careful.

[Transcript ends.]

 

Follow-up:

I asked Erin to interview a few residents of Gowganda, and those who agreed to speak to her all corroborated Samuel Rood’s report. Samuel’s grandfather, John Blackwater, is still missing, and Samuel himself has returned to Englehart, so their house was locked. However Carla Hill allowed Erin to take pictures of the ‘root cellar’ in her own home as long as she did not try to go inside. These, along with Samuel’s photographs of the map, are included in the incident report file. I looked into the book myself and photocopied all the pages—I have confirmed that the map of Toronto has added more tunnels since the first time I opened it, and that the photocopies do not have the same properties as the original. I have uploaded scans of all the pages as of September 2, 2007, but if you want the original book please request to have it sent.

Recommendation: keep. With so many witnesses in agreement there is no doubt that Gowganda has been permanently altered by _No Stone Unturned_. This report’s wealth of supplementary material makes it extremely valuable to anyone wishing to understand the book.

L.W. 9/8/2007

 

She gets up to stretch and put another pin in the map. Since it’s in eastern Canada this one is a bit of an outlier; more of the pins are clustered in the western US, between the Rockies and the Pacific co—

She almost jumps out of her skin when there’s a knock on the door, and spins to stare accusingly at it. No-one should be able to come to her door without her Seeing them. And she still can’t.

“Frances,” says Julia’s voice outside. “The archivist from the Magnus Institute.”

“Come in.” Frances stares at the door as it opens to reveal an old woman who strides in and sits down without any ceremony in the chair in front of Frances’ desk. She can’t _See_ her. It’s like she’s only half a person, and she _concealed Julia from her_. A tiny shudder goes through Frances, though of course she hides it well.

“Ms. Robinson had a request—”

“Thank you, Julia, but I can speak for myself.” Julia purses her lips and seems to shrink back from Robinson, sitting down compactly in the second chair. Frances is beginning to get angry. “Your Archivist informs me that she does not have the authority to release information to me. Even if it is crucial to stopping the Buried ritual.”

Frances leans back in her chair, feeling her own unprotected back. “The Buried? How… poetic. Thank you for coming to me, Julia, but I see no reason not to share, if Ms. Robinson intends to take direct action. Although I would be very interested to hear about your plan.”

“How else does one relieve a tight space? By widening it. Now, may I request—”

Frances stands and walks around the desk, behind Robinson, who refuses to even look at her. “I’m going to need you to be a little more specific than that,” she says pleasantly. “You’re not exactly an agent of Agoraphobia yourself.”

“I am not,” says Robinson stiffly. “But I intend to secure one. Your statements will determine what kind of preparation he requires. And so I would like to request, along with a summary of your findings, copies of every statement on _Claustrophobia_ from the last three years. Preferably on paper.”

“We don’t have a document like that,” says Julia. “I can put something together—” Julia half-rises, and Frances puts her hands on Julia’s shoulders, pressing her back down into her seat.

“You don’t need to do that, Julia. You aren’t obligated to run errands for Ms. Robinson. She’s a smart woman and I’m sure she’s perfectly capable of printing out a few reports herself.”

Julia looks up at her from the corner of her eye and Frances pulls just slightly, just enough to See that she understands. “Of course,” says Julia. “I do have much more important work to be doing, as do all the archivists here, if you’ll forgive me, Ms. Robinson.”

Robinson’s stony face is answer enough to make a small point of satisfaction bloom in Frances’ chest. Is it petty? Of course it is, but there is no irritation too petty to inflict on the woman who has shunned every gift the Fear of the Watcher has tried to give her. “I think you can find your own way to the Archive,” Frances says. “Of course you can always come to me or Julia with questions. Now if you’ll excuse us.” She tightens her hands a little on Julia’s shoulders, and Julia shifts under them. Let Robinson see exactly what they are together. Let her know she cannot split them.

“Very well,” says Robinson, rising. “If you ever do feel like offering any meaningful help, I’m sure you know where to find me.” And she walks stiffly out the door and closes it behind her.

Frances watches it for a moment, but there is no way of knowing whether Robinson has really left. “I don’t like her,” she tells Julia. “She isn’t even a void. That would be trackable. No, she doesn’t exist at all.”

“She’s not an Archivist,” says Julia, frowning out the window. “She’s something else. Unaligned, maybe.”

“See if you can find out how she’s hiding herself. Archivist to archivist. She seems to think she can manipulate you, or at least tell you what to do. Decided to play a little hapless today?”

Julia shrugs under Frances’ hands. “She’s used to… I won’t lie to you, she has a kind of gravity. She pulled me in when she arrived. It’s like she assumes everyone will bend to her will and then… it doesn’t occur to them not to.”

“Ties to the Fear of Manipulation?” She releases Julia’s shoulders, and her Archivist stands up.

“I’ll see what I can find out.” Julia pauses and turns to look at her. “Don’t worry about me, Frances. She has no claim on me and no real power here.”

“No, she doesn’t,” murmurs Frances. She brushes her thumb, lightly, over the side of Julia’s cheek. “I do.”

Outwardly Julia only nods and leaves, but with the smallest tug Frances can taste the cocktail of defiant loyalty, returned possessiveness, and deeply suppressed unease. That unease spikes a little as she feels Frances pulling on her thoughts, but Julia is more than used to that by now. It’s taken a while to train her to it, but she finally seems to be convinced that this is what she always wanted. Frances’ finest work; a truly beautiful Archivist.


	6. A Tale of the Ragged Mountains

Sal has been… kind of out of it, ever since they got the report from Seattle yesterday that Claustrophobia’s ritual was successfully prevented, at the cost of a town of five hundred people. When Frances used her magic powers (?!) to announce the exact day it was going to happen, Sal wanted to know why the hell they weren’t going over there to stop it themselves. Of course, it all came down to funding. It’s always cheaper to send someone to drive over from nearby than fly the people in who actually know what they’re doing. And that weird British lady was on the case, so, guess that’s fine!

It _was_ fine in the end, but Sal is still kind of pissed off about it. And honestly, reading reports about the leadup to the ritual isn’t helping her get less pissed off, but someone genuinely does have to do it. She’s going to be glad when they can put all this behind them and just… get really good at cross-referencing, or something. What is it even going to be like working at the Foundation if there’s no crisis coming up? As long as she’s been here the end of the world has been looming over everything. Maybe it will feel pointless.

For now, though, she has to sort through the aftermath.

 

Instance reported by: Risa Talbot, via email  
Location of incident: Bitterroot Mountains, ID  
Date received: 06-11-2008

Incident summary: The mountains are waking.

To the Usher Foundation:

I’m told that you have an ongoing project to document potentially supernatural occurrences, especially related to seismology. Personally I’m not sure what supernatural is any more, since the range of natural phenomena is so broad and astonishing. But what’s been happening in the Bitterroot Mountains these past few months seems like something out of a myth, so I think it qualifies.

As a bit of background, I work in conservation. Specifically salmon conservation, since it’s such an important animal in and around the reservation. Salmon fishing season starts in earnest in late May and ends in late fall, so my team does a major survey every spring and a more cursory survey after the season is over. We spend a lot of time in the mountains, miles and miles from any town. It’s more beautiful than you can imagine when in the spring the yellow grass briefly turns green and wildflowers spring up everywhere. The point I’m trying to make is that I understand the lay of the land very well, and I have an especially detailed knowledge of all the watersheds—how the streams flow into each other, where they meet, and how the salmon are distributed in them. That’s important because this spring the salmon weren’t distributed normally. It was like some of them had just been carried into new streams, so that some had too many fish and some had almost none. As you can imagine, this was very worrying. Half of my team set out to survey the streams themselves to see if we could find an explanation for it.

We did, more or less. We found that many of the streams had changed shape, and were flowing over places where there hadn’t _been_ streambeds last year. In one case we actually hiked up a hill and found the old streambed, because it was filled with rocks and sediment and there wasn’t much grass growing on it.

Can I convey in words how frightening that was? Nothing in my knowledge of topography covered this. Half the watercourses in the Bitterroot Mountains had been moved by something so large I couldn’t understand it. It felt like a god was playing with us. But what could we do? We documented the new courses of the streams and tried to make plans for how the fishing season would have to change. We even started to get used to it—just as long as it didn’t happen again, we would be fine.

Then one night while we were camped out in our vans, it did happen again. I’d gotten out to pee, around moonrise—it was a little more than half moon, so it rose pretty late, but there was enough light to see by, and I decided to take a little bit of a walk. I walked up to the top of a nearby hill and looked up at the peaks, sitting quiet in the moonlight. No, not quiet. Have you ever looked over a hilly landscape and thought it looked like a quilt draped over a vast sleeping body? It was because I was standing on a hill that I could see them moving: the whole range of mountains shifting very slowly, like a restless sleeper who was going to wake soon. I could feel the ground trembling and the mountains seemed to grow taller—the hills around me grew taller until I was standing in a deep narrow valley ringed by them. And then they started to close in… I was so afraid that the earth would turn over and swallow me up that I ran frantically up the nearest steep, steep hill and all the way back to where the vans were parked. When I looked back up I couldn’t see any sign that the mountains were moving. There was no sign that they’d ever moved, except that I could see the tops of five tall hills poking up a quarter mile away.

In the morning I honestly thought it was a dream, something I imagined from the mystery of the migrating streams. That’s why I didn’t do what I should have done and tell my team we needed to leave. The thing is, I only _saw_ them moving at night for the first couple of weeks, so I thought it was a dream I kept having. A terrifying dream where every night I wandered away from the campsite without wanting to and was almost swallowed up. But the streams kept changing, and it was clearly having a negative effect on the fish and every animal that lived in the mountains. But near the end of the month it happened at sunset. We had already settled down and were making dinner, and I’d stopped to watch the vivid red last light of the sun creeping up the peaks where the last of the snow was melting. But the peaks began to change shape, flattening and lengthening—but very slowly, as if whatever giant lay underneath it lived on a timescale we couldn’t understand. I thought I might be dreaming with my eyes open, but one by one the other members of my team turned to look up too, and I could see fear beginning to go into them. That was when I knew it wasn’t safe to stay there.

I told everyone that the land wasn’t stable, and we might find the valley we were camped in changing shape. I told them we needed to get out of the mountains right now. Some of them were reluctant to abandon our half-cooked dinner, but they could tell how frightened I was and they were frightened as well. We piled into the vans and started to drive away as fast as we safely could. I had ended up in the back seat and was twisted around to stare at the mountains changing above us as the earth shook.

Most of the vans made it out. One didn’t. I saw Tom  in the driver’s seat, desperately trying to make the car go any faster up a hill that must have been almost 45 degrees. But even with its spinning wheels it slid back into the ever-tightening valley and the hills around it closed over five of my team.

We haven’t gone back into the mountains, and I think my supervisor mostly believes us. It’s just that when you’re not _in_ the mountains you can’t see them moving. It’s too subtle. I don’t know what’s going to happen to the fishing season. I’m so afraid that anyone who goes to fish will be swallowed up—but if they don’t, what will we eat? And there are towns that are in the foothills…

Please write back if you’ve ever encountered something like this before, and if so how was it stopped?

Thank you,  
Risa Talbot.

 

Sal emails Risa back requesting an interview by phone with the remaining members of the team, and then checks the seismic database for any measurements in the Bitterroot Mountains. There are none. The nearest monitoring location is at the University of Montana in Missoula, which didn’t measure any unusual seismic activity. The best they’re going to get here is a story all the witnesses can agree on.

She sighs and checks the email again, but there’s nothing new that someone else hasn’t flagged, so she’s free to get up and wander a little. They do _have_ a searchable database of every report about Claustrophobia, but she feels more like doing it with her hands right now. Except that she bumps into someone on the way to the paper archive, and as she’s apologizing she realizes it’s the British lady.

“You’re an archivist,” she says in a weirdly accusatory way. No, what she’s saying is that Sal is an _Archivist_.

“Yeah?” says Sal. “It’s not like it’s a bad thing.”

“Hm,” says the woman.

“Um, do you want to make a report about how stopping the ritual went? Because it seems really useful. To know how you actually did that, because it’s supposed to happen again.”

“ _You_ have no need to worry about it,” says the woman. Rude. “I’ll make my report to the head Archivist. Have a good day.”

“Better you than us,” mutters Sal as the woman goes off in search of Julia’s office. Maybe eventually she’ll believe it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A lot of the tribes local to the Washington/Oregon/Idaho area are doing great work in conservation. Personally I don't know how one actually conserves wild fish and I made up almost everything in this statement, but it does take place in the region of Nez Percé. Anyway I hope you enjoyed this weird anticlimactic fanfiction about dirt n archivists.


End file.
